Notes

A reader thinks Jim Elliott “has a point” about the gun raffle at the University of Oregon:

I think the notion of turning a bunch of college students loose on campus with guns is a dubious idea. However, as there were no plans to have firearms at the proposed event, and since the group apparently is an approved student organization under the university charter, they are entitled to student activity money as much as the local chapter of NORML, or BLM, or the Young Republicans or whatever.

As sunlight is the best disinfectant, exposure to “unsafe” ideas is the best inoculation. Students who spend their college careers in a “safe space” will find themselves poorly served.

Several readers, on the other hand, disagree:

Mr. Elliott completely mischaracterizes the move as an illiberal attempt to quash opposing views and protect fragile student sensibilities. While that framing fits nicely with the increasingly accepted narrative of coddled coeds and intolerant Liberals, the student senate meeting minutes show opposition was based almost exclusively on the fear that giving away free guns to college students would pose a safety risk. (One student senator brought up liability issues and two others did not want to support a gambling event.) Several of the student representatives specifically said they would have supported funding the event if not for gun giveaway.

To me, this seems an uncontroversial move to protect students' physical safety.

Countless studies have shown that one’s chances of being the victim of gun crime or injury/death (including accidental and self-inflicted) increase with the number of guns in a community and the ease access.

I am roughly a decade out of college, but if I were still a student I would have very much welcomed an open debate on gun policy. But given what we know about the link between guns and death/injury, I absolutely would feel less physically safe in an environment with more guns.

There’s also something chilling and seemingly contrary to notions of “free and open debate” when one of the sides wants to show up armed. It takes and incredible amount of sophistry or delusion, perhaps both, for Mr. Elliott to twist this into an act of “intimidation” that creates an “unsafe learning environment” for gun proponents by making them “less secure, less an equal part of their community” and stripping them of their right to appeal the university's gun ban policy. Even more maddening is how Mr. Elliott mocks legitimate safety concerns over guns on campus as some sort of personal psychological defect—ignoring the grim reality that gun injuries are projected to surpass automobile accidents as the leading cause of young people dying this year.

No one in the UofO case was opposing the debate over the school’s gun policy or the group’s right to advocate its views. The group was still scheduled to give away the guns at the poker tournament as planned. They just had to find someone else to pay for the pizza.

Another reader points to recent events:

Elliott asks that the students remember the context of where they live—Oregon. He’d probably do well to consider context, too—in particular, the context of gun violence on college campuses. According to The Washington Post, as of Oct. 1st, there were 294 mass shootings in the country in the 274 days of 2015 up to that point. This number was calculated after the recent shooting in Oregon at a community college campus. These students aren’t concerned for figurative safe spaces; they have legitimate reason to question their actual safety.

Perhaps the YAL students could request that $950 towards a guest speaker, a subscription to a libertarian journal the library doesn’t yet have access to, or pizza for an event were literal guns aren’t the prizes, but a trip to a shooting range is.

Another reader looks to the broader trend of gun violence in schools:

For ten years I have worked at college or university. In that time, we’ve had incidents like Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and Umpqua Community College. Ten years ago, staff meetings consisted of advice on how to calm emotionally distraught students; this year, we had two sessions alone on how to react to an active shooter on campus. (The key to survival is to flee. If you are unable to flee then you must hide in a locked area. If you cannot secure yourself in a locked area then play dead, possum-like; shooters typically lose track of who they’ve shot and generally will ignore prone bodies.) I came of age during Columbine. Before Columbine we had no procedures for intruders on campus at my high school, no training sessions on how to hide. Then after Columbine …

For almost twenty years now, we’ve lived in an age where several times a year a disturbed man will get a gun and shoot up public places. It’s possible that I may go into work on a day that a domestic terrorist targets my school and it could be my last day. I do not dwell on this possibility any more than I linger on thoughts of whether I could die in a car crash. And I am aware I am more likely to die in a car than in a mass shooting. Nevertheless, campuses don’t really feel like safe places to me.

It’s not because of speech. It’s not because of racial tension or sexual violence, both of which deserve our attention. It is because of how vulnerable I am to the whims of a domestic terrorist. And no one seems to really have a solution to the problem because all conversations about shootings devolve into a fruitless argument about gun control. (By the way, I don’t know why more responsible gun-owners don’t advocate for measures to deter the use of firearms, but I digress.)

One more reader:

Count me as somebody who is not convinced these types of speech policing incidents are a sign this generation is regressing on the issue of free speech. I think it’s just as likely they are simply contending with more of these decisions on their own. They’ll probably navigate through these complexities just fine, and we’ll look back and realize all of our fretting was unnecessary.

Update from Jim Elliott:

Your first correspondent engages in a rather profound act of mind-reading and ignores the fact that I took no position myself on UO’s gun ban itself. I’m actually completely fine with local municipalities, businesses, etc. choosing to ban the carry of firearms (though some will point out that the problem with UO is that it is in-part government-funded, which I will concede is a legal problem above my pay grade). This is absolutely in keeping with the history of the right to keep and bear arms in this country; localities who know their situations best make the rules most conducive for community.

I am not mocking safety concerns—I’m pointing out how utterly solipsistic the concern is unless the students confine themselves solely to campus for the entirety of their tenure there. The students of the University of Oregon navigate and experience the very situation they say they are in fear of every day.

Your first correspondent engages in exactly the kind of sophistry I’m talking about: No one was coming armed to campus for the event. And yet, the mere discussion of something already permitted by the law in Oregon is tantamount to arriving at a gun rights protest armed (not something I personally am in favor of—I don’t think you get very far knowingly upsetting the people you need to convince). It also takes a pretty profound lack of empathy not to see how the suppression of a meaningful event of political speech to a campus subgroup would serve to alienate that group from the community. Solipsism isn’t a psychological defect, but it is an impediment to rationality.

I recall a protest while attending UC Davis back in 2000 or 2001: A Palestinian student organization cut out person-shaped wood forms and splattered them with red paint to represent the Palestinians killed to-date during the ongoing Second Infitada. The leader of that organization penned an op-ed in the student newspaper arguing that Palestinians detonating suicide vests on buses filled with school children was justified by Israel's mandatory service law. That’s pretty upsetting. My Jewish friends were uniformly filled with loathing, with rage, and, yes, with fear. The idea that murdering children because they may one day be a soldier is monstrous, and you cannot help but wonder at the actions such a person might be willing to take.

And yet, Jewish student organizations did not call for the closing of the paper or an apology, did not demand that the university silence the Palestinians students for portraying violence and creating an unsafe climate on-campus towards Jews. No, they protested in turn. They countered speech with speech, not with the levers of student bureaucracy.

Student government is funded by a proportion of student fees. Just as we have, over time, concluded that the use of tax dollars to exclude ideological minorities is wrong, so too does this principal apply to the student budget. If you fund pizza for the UO chapter of NARAL, for the chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ, for the Black Student Union, for the Robots are Really Cool and We Want to Play With Them Club, then you fund pizza for everyone, or you fund pizza for none. And if you will not do so, if you intend to exclude others based on the content of their beliefs, then you are nothing but a tyrannical majority and you have ceded your moral claim to representation of the student body.

Everyone is vulnerable to the whims of a domestic terrorist. The modern system is incredibly fragile. Risk mitigation is a personal responsibility. Being security-aware isn’t an act of paranoia; it’s an act of duty towards oneself and one’s family. There’s a reason lone wolves are the nightmare of law enforcement: They’re nearly impossible to stop.

I am not cavalier about the risk of violence. In my work, I have been assaulted and stabbed, and I have been threatened with a gun by a parent. Any place with large numbers of people is potentially unsafe, whether it is a school or a mall or a sporting event. No amount of campus policy or security can make it less so. There’s always risk. You can be paralyzed by it, or you can move forward and accept it. The least reasonable option is to stop discussing it.

Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?

“I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, told The American Prospectlast year. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people. Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it. These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.

Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.

Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the marshmallow test, where our ability to resist gratification in early childhood predicts our achievements in later life. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.

At an inaugural desert festival of yogis and spirit guides like Russell Brand, an exclusive industry grapples with consumerism, addiction, and the actual meaning of wellness.

I first felt reality shift when, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, there was a line for a class called Body Blast Bootcamp, and I worried that there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone.

The draw to this explicitly not-fun undertaking, others in line told me, was that we would be glad to have done it when it was over. We all made it in, and the workout studio was a carpeted conference room where an Instagram-famous instructor with a microphone headset was waiting to give us high fives. “The hardest step is showing up!”

Once we started working out, a person walked around apparently taking Instagram videos, and people were not bothered by this. Another brought a mini tripod to get some shots of herself in action. There was shouting and a Coldplay house remix. Someone offered me a box of alkaline water, and I drank it because no neutral water was available.

“Rich people don’t get their own ‘better’ firefighters, or at least they aren’t supposed to.”

As multiple devastating wildfires raged across California, a private firefighting crew reportedly helped save Kanye West and Kim Kardashian’s home in Calabasas, TMZ reported this week. The successful defense of the $50 million mansion is the most prominent example of a trend that’s begun to receive national attention: for-hire firefighters protecting homes, usually on the payroll of an insurance company with a lot at risk.

The insurance companies AIG and Chubb have publicly talked about their private wildfire teams. AIG has its own “Wildfire Protection Unit,” while Chubb—and up to a dozen other insurers—contract with Wildfire Defense Systems, a Montana company that claims to have made 550 “wildfire responses on behalf of insurers,” including 255 in just the past two years. Right now in California, the company has 53 engines working to protect close to 1,000 homes.

Their huge mounds cover an area the size of Britain, and are visible from space.

In the east of Brazil, mysterious cones of earth rise from the dry, hard-baked soil. Each of these mounds is about 30 feet wide at its base, and stands six to 13 feet tall. From the ground, with about 60 feet of overgrown land separating each mound from its neighbors, it’s hard to tell how many there are. But their true extent becomes dramatically clear from space.

Using satellite images, Roy Funch from the State University of Feira de Santana has estimated that there are about 200 million of these mounds. They’re arrayed in an uncannily regular honeycomb-like pattern. Together, they cover an area roughly the size of Great Britain or Oregon, and they occupy as much space as the Great Pyramid of Giza 4,000 times over. And this colossal feat of engineering is, according to Funch, the work of the tiniest of engineers—a species of termite called Syntermes dirus, whose workers are barely half an inch long.

The civil-liberties organization has taken a stand against stronger due-process protections in campus tribunals that undermines its own principles.

Last week, the NRA kept defending gun rights, the AARP kept advocating for older Americans, and the California Avocado Commission was as steadfast as ever in touting “nature’s highest achievement.” By contrast, the ACLU issued a public statement that constituted a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.

The matter began when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos put forth new guidelines on how to comply with Title IX, the law that forbids colleges that receive federal funding to exclude any students, deny them benefits, or subject them to any discrimination on the basis of sex.

The most controversial changes concern what happens when a student stands accused of sexual misbehavior. “Under the new rules, schools would be required to hold live hearings and would no longer rely on a so-called single investigator model,” TheNew York Timesreports. “Accusers and students accused of sexual assault must be allowed to cross-examine each other through an adviser or lawyer. The rules require that the live hearings be conducted by a neutral decision maker and conducted with a presumption of innocence. Both parties would have equal access to all the evidence that school investigators use to determine facts of the case, and a chance to appeal decisions.” What’s more, colleges will now have the option to choose a somewhat higher evidentiary standard, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “a preponderance of the evidence” in order to establish someone’s guilt.

At an international conference, allies grieved the loss of the United States they had believed in.

Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on November 19, 2018

The Halifax Security Forum is designed to be a gathering of the world’s democratic countries, which are allied to protect each other. Hosted by the Canadian defense minister, the Forum’s signature is the brief videos that introduce the annual gathering. This year’s intro showed relay runners, mostly American, at the Olympics from Berlin in 1936 forward, ending in an uncertain baton handoff—a powerful metaphor for the free world’s worries about American leadership in the age of Trump.*

The Halifax Forum, occurring just after President Donald Trump unleashed yet another petulant tirade against Germany and France that culminated in the unseemly taunt that Parisians were speaking German until the U.S. intervened in World Wars I and II, had a funereal feel this year. Allies are grieving the loss of an America they believed in, as it sinks in that they cannot rely on us any longer.

Journalists have become complicit in spreading the president’s falsehoods and conspiracy theories. Here’s how they can do better.

The news media today face an epistemic crisis: how to publish the president’s commentary without amplifying his fabrications and conspiracy theories.

One flashpoint came several weeks ago, when President Donald Trump told Axios reporters that he planned to use an executive order to end birthright citizenship because, as he put it, “we’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen.” On Twitter, Axios CEO and co-founder Jim VandeHei wrote, “Exclusive: Trump to terminate birthright citizenship.”

As many journalists quickly pointed out, this was multilayered malarkey. The president was proposing an unconstitutional means of obliterating the Fourteenth Amendment on the basis of a falsehood; more than two dozen countries in the Western Hemisphere have unrestricted jus soli laws, like the U.S. Axios was treating as fact a haphazard plan, in search of an impossible outcome, justified by a false assertion.

Years later, many adults still pine for the days their school libraries, auditoriums, and gyms transformed into pop-up bookstores.

In the early 1980s, the world of school book fairs was “a highly competitive and very secretive industry,” according to a New York Timesarticleat the time. The fairs numbered in the thousands and spanned the United States. They were put on by a mix of organizers: A few national corporations, about 25 to 30 regional companies, and assorted bookstores.

By the 1990s, one organizer reigned: the Scholastic Corporation. Scholastic, founded in 1920 to publish books and magazines aimed at young readers, had purchased several of its smaller competitors. The company became the largest operator of children’s book fairs in the country, a title it still holds today.

But we’re not here to talk about Scholastic’s business history, and I think you know that. If you’re a young adult who attended elementary school in the United States, I’d guess that when you saw the headline on this story, something deep inside your mind cracked open. With an unmistakable pang of nostalgia,the memory of a Scholastic book fair, with all its concomitant joys, came flooding in.

Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?

“I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, told The American Prospectlast year. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people. Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it. These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.

Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.

Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the marshmallow test, where our ability to resist gratification in early childhood predicts our achievements in later life. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.

At an inaugural desert festival of yogis and spirit guides like Russell Brand, an exclusive industry grapples with consumerism, addiction, and the actual meaning of wellness.

I first felt reality shift when, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, there was a line for a class called Body Blast Bootcamp, and I worried that there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone.

The draw to this explicitly not-fun undertaking, others in line told me, was that we would be glad to have done it when it was over. We all made it in, and the workout studio was a carpeted conference room where an Instagram-famous instructor with a microphone headset was waiting to give us high fives. “The hardest step is showing up!”

Once we started working out, a person walked around apparently taking Instagram videos, and people were not bothered by this. Another brought a mini tripod to get some shots of herself in action. There was shouting and a Coldplay house remix. Someone offered me a box of alkaline water, and I drank it because no neutral water was available.

“Rich people don’t get their own ‘better’ firefighters, or at least they aren’t supposed to.”

As multiple devastating wildfires raged across California, a private firefighting crew reportedly helped save Kanye West and Kim Kardashian’s home in Calabasas, TMZ reported this week. The successful defense of the $50 million mansion is the most prominent example of a trend that’s begun to receive national attention: for-hire firefighters protecting homes, usually on the payroll of an insurance company with a lot at risk.

The insurance companies AIG and Chubb have publicly talked about their private wildfire teams. AIG has its own “Wildfire Protection Unit,” while Chubb—and up to a dozen other insurers—contract with Wildfire Defense Systems, a Montana company that claims to have made 550 “wildfire responses on behalf of insurers,” including 255 in just the past two years. Right now in California, the company has 53 engines working to protect close to 1,000 homes.

Their huge mounds cover an area the size of Britain, and are visible from space.

In the east of Brazil, mysterious cones of earth rise from the dry, hard-baked soil. Each of these mounds is about 30 feet wide at its base, and stands six to 13 feet tall. From the ground, with about 60 feet of overgrown land separating each mound from its neighbors, it’s hard to tell how many there are. But their true extent becomes dramatically clear from space.

Using satellite images, Roy Funch from the State University of Feira de Santana has estimated that there are about 200 million of these mounds. They’re arrayed in an uncannily regular honeycomb-like pattern. Together, they cover an area roughly the size of Great Britain or Oregon, and they occupy as much space as the Great Pyramid of Giza 4,000 times over. And this colossal feat of engineering is, according to Funch, the work of the tiniest of engineers—a species of termite called Syntermes dirus, whose workers are barely half an inch long.

The civil-liberties organization has taken a stand against stronger due-process protections in campus tribunals that undermines its own principles.

Last week, the NRA kept defending gun rights, the AARP kept advocating for older Americans, and the California Avocado Commission was as steadfast as ever in touting “nature’s highest achievement.” By contrast, the ACLU issued a public statement that constituted a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.

The matter began when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos put forth new guidelines on how to comply with Title IX, the law that forbids colleges that receive federal funding to exclude any students, deny them benefits, or subject them to any discrimination on the basis of sex.

The most controversial changes concern what happens when a student stands accused of sexual misbehavior. “Under the new rules, schools would be required to hold live hearings and would no longer rely on a so-called single investigator model,” TheNew York Timesreports. “Accusers and students accused of sexual assault must be allowed to cross-examine each other through an adviser or lawyer. The rules require that the live hearings be conducted by a neutral decision maker and conducted with a presumption of innocence. Both parties would have equal access to all the evidence that school investigators use to determine facts of the case, and a chance to appeal decisions.” What’s more, colleges will now have the option to choose a somewhat higher evidentiary standard, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “a preponderance of the evidence” in order to establish someone’s guilt.

At an international conference, allies grieved the loss of the United States they had believed in.

Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on November 19, 2018

The Halifax Security Forum is designed to be a gathering of the world’s democratic countries, which are allied to protect each other. Hosted by the Canadian defense minister, the Forum’s signature is the brief videos that introduce the annual gathering. This year’s intro showed relay runners, mostly American, at the Olympics from Berlin in 1936 forward, ending in an uncertain baton handoff—a powerful metaphor for the free world’s worries about American leadership in the age of Trump.*

The Halifax Forum, occurring just after President Donald Trump unleashed yet another petulant tirade against Germany and France that culminated in the unseemly taunt that Parisians were speaking German until the U.S. intervened in World Wars I and II, had a funereal feel this year. Allies are grieving the loss of an America they believed in, as it sinks in that they cannot rely on us any longer.

Journalists have become complicit in spreading the president’s falsehoods and conspiracy theories. Here’s how they can do better.

The news media today face an epistemic crisis: how to publish the president’s commentary without amplifying his fabrications and conspiracy theories.

One flashpoint came several weeks ago, when President Donald Trump told Axios reporters that he planned to use an executive order to end birthright citizenship because, as he put it, “we’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen.” On Twitter, Axios CEO and co-founder Jim VandeHei wrote, “Exclusive: Trump to terminate birthright citizenship.”

As many journalists quickly pointed out, this was multilayered malarkey. The president was proposing an unconstitutional means of obliterating the Fourteenth Amendment on the basis of a falsehood; more than two dozen countries in the Western Hemisphere have unrestricted jus soli laws, like the U.S. Axios was treating as fact a haphazard plan, in search of an impossible outcome, justified by a false assertion.

Years later, many adults still pine for the days their school libraries, auditoriums, and gyms transformed into pop-up bookstores.

In the early 1980s, the world of school book fairs was “a highly competitive and very secretive industry,” according to a New York Timesarticleat the time. The fairs numbered in the thousands and spanned the United States. They were put on by a mix of organizers: A few national corporations, about 25 to 30 regional companies, and assorted bookstores.

By the 1990s, one organizer reigned: the Scholastic Corporation. Scholastic, founded in 1920 to publish books and magazines aimed at young readers, had purchased several of its smaller competitors. The company became the largest operator of children’s book fairs in the country, a title it still holds today.

But we’re not here to talk about Scholastic’s business history, and I think you know that. If you’re a young adult who attended elementary school in the United States, I’d guess that when you saw the headline on this story, something deep inside your mind cracked open. With an unmistakable pang of nostalgia,the memory of a Scholastic book fair, with all its concomitant joys, came flooding in.